These are images of the Youth Center in Qingpu designed by Atelier Deshaus. You may remember that we shared a Kindergarden in Jiading that the firm designed a few months ago, or maybe this is your first time seeing the diaphanous and boxy skins that mark some of the firm’s recent work. Although a single project, the mass of this project’s program is divided into smaller-scaled blocks that would read as individual buildings if it weren’t for the unifying color palette and punched-out openings. If I understand the architects’ description correctly, one of the goals of the project was to break down the behemoth size of the project to a scale more appropriate for the location and use of the project:

Whole theme is based on such idea: on the premise of adapting adjacent urban scale, a small inner public space of human scale will be created in order to reconstruct the memory of traditional townscape scale.

In this case, the unifying color palette and repeated formal gestures undermine the architect’s goals. While their effort results in a pristine series of alluring photographs (taken by photographer Yao Li) they are photographs of a place that still looks monolithic. The series of outdoor spaces that connect elements of the building are as bright and open as the architects intended, but when rendered almost entirely in shades of white the spaces look too pristine and almost alienating. Still, what’s remarkable about this project is the decision to express the project as a series of smaller masses; to dissolve and distribute the program until it starts to resemble a small city.

Found through ArchDaily